Date published: 02/02/2010

A moving service of remembrance and reflection was held to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 at Radcliffe Civic Suite.

This was attended by the Mayor of Bury, Councillor Sheila Magnall, faith and community leaders, and an audience of 250 from across the borough including a number of holocaust survivors.

Young people from all the secondary schools in Bury contributed to the service through readings and Bury College students performed an evocative dance piece to music from “Schindler’s List”. The service included music from Bury Music Centre and song from Bury AcaPeelers and Bury Young Voices.

Particularly poignant was the reading of a poem written by the late Mendel Beale who was a prisoner in Auschwitz, read by his grandson Daniel Nelson, which described the awful conditions in the camp.

Boys from Manchester Mesivta High School told us about “Oneg Shabbat”, or “Sabbath Delight”. This was the code name used by a group of prisoners in the Warsaw ghetto. They came together to write down their collective and individual stories so that the world would know what had happened to them. These documents were buried in milk churns and metal boxes and discovered under the ruins of Warsaw after the war.

This year’s theme was “The Legacy of Hope” which encouraged those present to consider the legacy left by the survivors of the Holocaust, many of whom have contributed much to their community and to holocaust education.

Organiser Cath Fernley, the council’s children and young people’s strategy officer, said: “The service demonstrated the strong commitment from Bury Council to commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day and involved a substantial number of young people. The service was an opportunity to reflect on those awful times but also to be hopeful about our future.”

The event marked the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It remembers the six million Jews exterminated in the Second World War, but also other groups persecuted by the Nazi regime and those lost in subsequent genocides such as in Bosnia, Darfur, Cambodia and Rwanda.